Hunting for fossils is a difficult business in the first place, but the challenge is multiplied the farther back in time you’re searching. Finding bones from a dinosaur that lived 50 million years ago is a cake walk compared to hunting for evidence of life from billions of years back. A new analysis of supposed …
When it comes to animals with iconic features, the turtle is high on the list. Deer have horns, kangaroos have pouches, humans have existential dread, and turtles have shells… right? Apparently that wasn’t always the case, as a new set of fossils from China reveals that some ancient turtles never bothered to grow a shell …
This time of year many people flock to Florida in search of sunny beaches and Mickey Mouse, but the city of Cape Coral is now known for something entirely different. As local news outlet WCTV reports, a construction crew working in the city stumbled upon something they weren’t expecting while digging deep to perform some …
Fossil hunting isn’t quite as cut-and-dry as you might think it is. Finding the leftovers of a creature that lived a hundred million years ago is exciting, and while dinosaurs and many plants are relatively easy to identify based on their remains, creatures from even farther back in Earth’s history have left scientists scratching their …
Finding an fossilized bone on accident might be a pleasant surprise for scientists, or even a kid, but when dam workers in Japan stumbled across a large bone back in the 1950s they didn’t really know what to do with it. The unidentified bone was presumed to be from a dinosaur, and while it was …
Ferocious carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus tend to take top billing when it comes to dinosaur pop culture, but the colossal plant-eaters known as sauropods are just as worthy of acclaim. This group of long-necked beasts include the brachiosaurus, brontosaurus, apatosaurus, and diplodocus as well as many others, and paleontologists in China are now ready to …
If there’s one thing that Jurassic Park taught us (besides the fact that Jeff Goldblum is a national treasure and should be cherished) it’s that ancient tree sap is really really good at preserving bugs. Despite the wealth of pseudoscience and outright fiction in Jurassic Park, the ability of hardened amber to offer a glimpse …
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the Earth was like when massive beasts like the Tyrannosaurus rex freely roamed the land, but it can be even harder to go all the way to a time before dinosaurs were so fantastically dominant. There was planet Earth, ripe for habitation, with animal life still figuring out what …
The job of Josh Hansen, a park manager at Red Fleet State Park in Utah, shouldn’t be nearly as complicated as it’s becoming. Part of Hansen’s job is to keep people from ruining the park, which should be pretty straightforward considering the park is a lot of rock, water, and desert. However, one of the …
Finding ancient fossils is no easy task, even for seasoned paleontologists and other researchers who spend their lives guessing where they might uncover the leftovers of some long-dead creature. An 11-year-old girl from Tennessee managed to do just that, and she wasn’t even trying. Young Ryleigh Taylor discovered the fossilized remains of a trilobite, a …
